“So, you cook for yourself. How did you learn?”
“Most Chinese men know how. We learn from our parents as children.”
DiMilo smiled. “I, as well, but I have not cooked for myself in years. The older I get the less they allow me to do for myself, eh, Franz?”
“I have my duties also, Eminence,” the German answered. He was drinking the mao-tai with a little more gusto. Must be nice to have a young stomach lining, both the older men thought.
“So, how do you find Beijing?” Yu asked.
“Truly fascinating. We Romans think that our city is ancient and redolent with history, but Chinese culture was old before the Romans set one stone upon another. And the art we saw yesterday..
“The jade mountain,” Schepke explained. “I spoke with the guide, but she didn’t know about the artists involved, or the time required to carve it.”
“The names of artisans and the time they needed—these were not matters of importance to the emperors of old. There was much beauty then, yes, but much cruelty as well.”
“And today?” Renato asked.
“Today as well, as you know, Eminence,” Yu confirmed with a long sigh. They spoke in English, and Yu’s Oklahoma accent fascinated his visitors. “The government lacks the respect for human life, which you and I would prefer.”
“Changing that will not be simple,” Monsignor Schepke added. The problem wasn’t limited to the communist PRC government. Cruelty had long been part of Chinese culture, to the point that someone had once said that China was too vast to be governed with kindness, an aphorism picked up with indecent haste by the left wings of the world, ignoring the explicit racism in such a statement. Perhaps the problem was that China had always been crowded, and in crowds came anger, and in anger came a callous disregard for others. Nor had religion helped. Confucius, the closest thing China had developed to a great religious leader, preached conformity as a person’s best action. While the Judeo-Christian tradition talked of transcendent values of right and wrong, and the human rights that devolved from them, China saw authority as Society, not God. For that reason, Cardinal DiMilo thought, communism had taken root here. Both societal models were alike in their absence of an absolute rule of right and wrong. And that was dangerous. In relativism lay man’s downfall, because, ultimately, if there were no absolute values, what difference was there between a man and a dog? And if there were no such difference, where was man’s fundamental dignity? Even a thinking atheist could mark religion’s greatest gift to human society: human dignity, the value placed on a single human life, the simple idea that man was more than an animal. That was the foundation of all human progress, because without it, human life was doomed to Thomas Hobbes’s model, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Christianity—and Judaism, and Islam, which were also religions of The Book—required merely that man believe in that which was self-evident: There was order in the universe, and that order came from a source, and that source was called God. Christianity didn’t even require that a man believe in that idea—not anymore, anyway—just that he accept the sense of it, and the result of it, which was human dignity and human progress. Was that so hard?
It was for some. Marxism, in condemning religion as “the opiate of the people,” merely prescribed another, less effective drug—”the radiant future,” the Russians had called it, but it was a future they’d never been able to deliver. In China, the Marxists had shown the good sense to adopt some of the forms of capitalism to save their country s economy, but not to adopt the principle of human freedom that usually came along with it. That had worked to this point, DiMilo thought, only because Chinese culture had a preexisting model of conformity and acceptance of authority from above. But how long would that last? And how long could China prosper without some idea of the difference between what was right and what was wrong? Without that information, China and the Chinese were doomed to perdition. Someone had to bring the Good News of Jesus to the Chinese, because with that came not only eternal salvation, but temporal happiness as well. Such a fine bargain, and yet there were those too stupid and too blind to accept it. Mao had been one. He’d rejected all forms of religion, even Confucius and the Lord Buddha. But when he’d lain dying in his bed, what had Chairman Mao thought? To what Radiant Future had he looked forward then? What did a communist think on his deathbed? The answer to that question was something none of the three clergymen wanted to know, or to face.
“I was disappointed to see the small number of Catholics here—not counting foreigners and diplomats, of course. How bad is the persecution?”
Yu shrugged. “It depends on where you are, and the political climate, and the personality of the local party leadership. Sometimes they leave us alone—especially when foreigners are here, with their TV cameras. Sometimes they can become very strict, and sometimes they can harass us directly. I have been questioned many times, and been subjected to political counseling.” He looked up and smiled. “It’s like having a dog bark at you, Eminence. You need not answer back. Of course, you will be spared any of that,” the Baptist pointed out, noting DiMilo’s diplomatic status, and his resulting personal inviolability.
The cardinal caught that reference, somewhat to his discomfort. He didn’t see his life as any more valuable than anyone else’s. Nor did he wish his faith to appear less sincere than this Chinese Protestant’s, who’d been educated at some pretentious pseudo-university in the American prairie, whereas he had acquired his knowledge in some of the most ancient and honored institutions of higher learning on the planet, whose antecedents went back to the Roman empire, and beyond that, to the chambers of Aristotle himself. If there was one vanity Renato Cardinal DiMilo possessed, it was in his education. He’d been superbly educated, and he knew it. He could discuss Plato’s Republic in Attic Greek, or the law cases of Marcus Tullius Cicero in Imperial Latin. He could debate a committed Marxist on the attributes of that political philosophy in the same language the German Marx himself had spoken—and win, because Marx had left a lot of unfilled holes in the walls of his political theories. He’d forgotten more about human nature than some psychologists knew. He was in the Vatican’s diplomatic service because he could read minds—better than that, he could read the minds of politicians and diplomats highly skilled in concealing their thoughts. He could have been a gambler of talent and riches with these skills, but instead he applied them for the Greater Glory of God.
His only failing was that, like all men, he could not predict the future, and thus could not see the world war that this meeting would ultimately bring about.
“So, does the government harass you?” the Cardinal asked his host.
A shrug. “Occasionally. I propose to hold a prayer service in public to test their willingness to interfere with my human rights. There is some danger involved, of course.”
It was a challenge skillfully delivered, and the elderly Catholic cleric rose to it: “Keep Franz and me informed, if you would.”
“SONGBIRD?” Ryan asked. “What can you tell me about him?”
“Do you really want to know, Jack?” Ed Foley asked, somewhat pointedly.
“You telling me I ought not to know?” Ryan responded. Then he realized that Robby Jackson and Ben Goodley were here as well, and he could know things which they could not. Even at this level, there were rules of classification. The President nodded. “Okay, we’ll let that one go for now.”
“The overall operation is called SORGE. That’ll change periodically,” Mary Pat told the assembled audience. Unusually, the Secret Service had been hustled out of the Oval Office for this briefing—which told the USSS a lot more than CIA would have liked—and also a special jamming system had been switched on. It would interfere with any electronic device in the room. You could see that from the TV set to the left of the President’s desk, tuned to CNN. The screen was now full of snow, but with the sound turned all the way down, there was no annoying noise to disturb the meeting. The possibility of a bug in this most secure of rooms was slight, but so great was the value of SORGE that this card was being played as well. The briefing folders had already been passed out. Robby looked up from his.
“Notes from the Chinese Politburo? Lordy,” Vice President Jackson breathed. “Okay, no sources and methods. That’s cool with me, guys. Now, how reliable is it?”
“For the moment, reliability is graded ‘B+’ “Mary Pat answered. “We expect to upgrade that later on. The problem is that we don’t grade ‘A’ or higher without outside confirmation, and this stuff is so deep inside that we have no other asset to verify what we have here.”